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Take 2.
I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.
Columbia Bugle
Jack Posobiec
Jack again
Maarblek
BlueandGray1864
Spencer Klavan
That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:
Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.
So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?
And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?
ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:
GigaThaad
Elon Musk
Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.
Culture war stories involving the legacy of the Confederacy--and Confederate heroes like Lee in particular--are always troubling to me, in part perhaps because, as a Southerner, I don't know myself what to make of that legacy. The existence of the whole Confederate movement is so inextricably bound up with the crime of slavery that celebrating the heroes of the movement seems, on its face, indefensible. I am probably more "woke" than the average Mottizen when it comes to American race issues; I believe HBD is a worse explanation for persistent black underachievement than the lingering effect of centuries of cultural disruption under slavery combined with decades of further disruption under racist post-Civil-War legislation (although neither explanation is fully satisfactory). I would find it shocking if the current problems with American black culture weren't primarily due to the uniquely extreme oppression blacks faced for so many generations. We can debate whether or not the South would have abandoned slavery on its own initiative without it being forced to do so by the Union's victory in the Civil War, but I don't see how one could deny that the intent of the founders of the Confederacy was to preserve slavery in perpetuity (mostly for the benefit of wealthy plantation owners, rather than working white Southerners). When people, on the Motte or elsewhere, castigate the Confederates as racist losers who picked a stupid fight in furtherance of an execrable cause, I can't find a good reason for disagreeing with them.
And yet I do disagree with them--I do admire Lee, and for some reason I'm proud of the South and of the Confederacy. I can't explain it rationally. I like that, despite being ill-equipped and outnumbered 2-1, the South held out for over four years in a hot war with a technologically superior foe. I'm glad we didn't just roll over to the North's demands, but made the Yankees fight for it. I even take a perverse and morbid pride in the fact we killed more of them than they killed of us.
What's even more confusing is that, for most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it seemed like it was fine to like the Confederacy. Pop-culture protagonists in books, movies, TV shows, comic strips, etc., could be Confederate soldiers or open Confederate sympathizers and still be beloved by post-war Americans, North and South. American society didn't seem interested in condemning pro-Confederate Southerners as "traitors" or excoriating them as "racists"--even though the charges were as just then as they are now. I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture. At best, people on both sides seemed willing to put the dark past behind them and settle into a mutual civility. At worst, it seemed like non-Southerners viewed Southern pride and loyalty to the rebel cause as a sort of quaint, harmless expression of regional patriotism.
The vitriol towards Confederates I see in stories like this and in some of the comments here seems new. I can't say that those commenters are wrong--I share their reasons for disliking the Confederacy, although something (maybe just the loyalty of my Southern blood) prevents me from reacting with the same level of antipathy. I just wonder what happened to the truce that seemed to have once reigned in this particular culture war.
10 to 1 it's bog standard internet polarization. It's probably unfair but I find that it's easy enough to attaint anyone who is a 'fan' of the confederacy as a dumbdumb (bad values (meaning values I don't like(This is fair because it's me))) .
Basically, I've had to talk with more people than I expected who have all sorts of opinions about the "war of northern aggression" and related subjects who A: Don't know who the fuck anyone but Lee is (Bedford? Stuart? Can you eat them?) and have ahistorical views about the war and, B: Also have some opinions about the blacks that I find slightly distasteful AND C: Are fucking stupid Low iq mouthbreathers.
This is almost certainly a sorting mechanism thing, but anyone online is going to run in to enough loud morons they disagree with to tar any ideology they like with any size brush.
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I know this wasn't the point of your post, but the way you sorta phrased this as a binary made something click in my mind. I'm gonna be honest, I can't buy either of these explanations. And both, oddly enough, for the same reason, the Greenwood District in Tulsa (site of the famous race riot). Ok, so not just Greenwood, but there's plenty of examples of functioning black communities from that era.
Modern society is just straight up not as racist as 1920s Oklahoma. And black people were able to build functioning communities within 60 years of gaining their freedom. And by all accounts, communities that worked quite well. I'm aware of the highway system disrupting black communities, but it's been 60 years since that happened, and that can't be as big of a disruption as being enslaved. There has to be, at the very least, a confounding factor.
At the same HBD makes no sense. The argument is generally that black people have too low of an average IQ to succeed, but we have examples of functioning communities. Even if it were true, the most extreme claims of the HBD groups tend to put the average IQ at around 70, and that's roughly where the US as a whole was circa 1900, and there's plenty of examples from that time of people with this average IQ forming perfectly functional communities. That can't be the entire explanation either.
I have my own hypothesis which is that the way that we’re trying to solve the race problems tends to make the racial disparities worse.
Taking Affirmative Action as an example. Well, there are two problems here that actually hurt the black community. First, it essentially creates a siphon of any marginally talented black person. If he’s smart enough to get through school and hard working enough to hold down a decent job, he leaves the inner city ghetto. Furthermore, almost none of the money he makes goes back into that community unless he makes a special effort. On top of that, the profits of his labor go, again, outside of this community. This creates an effective brain drain for the community. The people with the smarts and work ethic get sucked out to greener pastures. I5 also removes their positive example in that community. No one living in a community like that knows anyone who made a good life for himself by study and work — those people are in the suburbs. What’s left behind are the thieves or drug runners who make good money, or the wage slaves that struggle to feed and clothe their families.
The other part is that there aren’t a lot of black owned businesses. Part of this is simply the modern economy in which large companies can so easily leverage economies of scale that it’s hard to get a new business started. Part of it is the difficulty especially for the relatively poor to get loans to start businesses. Part of it is that people living there don’t have the skills. But the reason that black owned local businesses are important is that locally owned businesses are one of the few ways for any community to get money into the community and to stay in the community once it gets there. Immigrants use this to great effect. They open an ethnic restaurant hire local immigrants to do the work, feed a bunch of yuppies, then the immigrants use their wages in the local ethnic shops, as do immigrants who don’t work in the community. In other words, money comes in and stays in. This creates a wealth base, and as they pay taxes they’re more respectable to local government. They’re setting an example of hard work and study that kids can see paying off.
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You're leaving out the "it's the culture" explanation a typical red triber would point out to anyone he wasn't worried about offending.
Sure but that only gets us as far as the question 'whence culture'? There are obviously right-valence answers to this question which are the most prominent, but there are also progressive answers a la Ogbu, that African-American culture, if it has 'problems', is the product of their 'caste-like minority' status.
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It seems to me that today’s lack of racism could have some explanatory power. One hundred years ago, the smartest, hardest working, and most well-adjusted blacks were not allowed to join the dominant white society, instead becoming businessmen and leaders within their own parallel communities. They preached and modeled the sort of virtuous living that leads to better life outcomes—get an education, get and stay married, hold down a steady job, etc. Then once racial barriers were dismantled in the 1950s–60s, the most educated and high-performing blacks integrated into white society a la Cliff Huxtable, inadvertently leading their former communities to become dysfunctional, crime-ridden ghettos. It’s similar to the brain drain that’s happening in rural America and to the emigration conundrum facing many third world counties. The most capable leave, and the ones left behind aren’t the sort who make functional communities.
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To steelman the progressive position here, that picture can be analogized to this meme: sure, those two groups of Whites are able to amicably reconcile, but isn’t there some other group that they forgot to ask? What “Reconciliation” means, in this context, does not include reconciliation between Blacks and the Whites who subjugated them for centuries and then continued to do so for yet another century after the conclusion of the Civil War; rather, it’s just two sets of oppressors shaking hands while their victims remain subjected to their combined racist legacy. The recent wave of statue-toppling and iconoclasm, on the other hand, is true reconciliation: racist Whites being forced to acknowledge the consequences on their actions on Blacks whose considerations were left out of all previous farcical attempts at so-called “reconciliation”.
Do I buy that this noble idea is fully responsible for the recent push for iconoclasm? I wouldn’t say that I do (I wager that a good deal of it is, at least subconsciously, motivated by plain-and-simple outgroup-targeted antipathy in addition to any purer moral concerns). But I believe that it is a very reasonable explanation of the progressive opposition to the “truce” that’s existed for so long.
Show me a single black person alive who suffered as a result of American slavery?
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If you want there to be a race war you can just say so. Otherwise i point you towards Morgan Freemans line to Denzel in Glory "that kid youre complaing about having to dig a grave for died for you.
In other words how many have to die for before justice is served?
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What you grew up with was the fruit of the Reconciliation Movement after the civil war. This social contract was purposely torn up in 2016 by progressives butt hurt about Trump. I'm trying to find them now, but I was awash in editorials talking about how reconciliation was a mistake, and the boot should have been on Southern White's neck forever more to make them learn their place.
I would suggest 2016 was less the cause and more the 'masks off' moment.
Hanging around various fan forums in the early 2000s, one common thread I saw pop up time and time again was the typical 'Whatif' of 'What would you have done differently in the treatment of the South post civil-war' and the thread wouldn't even get past the first page before the notion of 'Kill them all' would get thrown out.
Ground-level liberal/progressives have had a common genocidal fantasy toward Southerners for a very long time, with very little if no pushback against it.
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I think you might be mixing up your timeline. Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner (2014), Freddie Gray (2015 - Ferguson riots attached), Philando Castile (2015) and other moments like Kaepernick (2015) and the Charleston church shooting (2015) ALL predate Trump. The racial unrest wasn’t invented by progressives. It was already there.
The double impact of the video of George Floyd (2020) and Trump’s own, self inflicted “both sides” response to the Charlottesville protester killings (2017) has far more to do with it than some progressive scheme to make Trump look bad. In particular that 2017 event was tied to Confederate backlash… which even extended to efforts within Southern states to remove Confederate flags. Mississippi removed their own flag in 2020. Even South Carolina stopped displaying it. While there was certainly national pressure to do so, it wasn’t progressive-exclusive.
And speaking in terms of the historiography, it’s also a big mistake to say that the sentiment was new. Many historians have long felt that Reconciliation was a bit too lenient. Since about the 60s I would say, reaching stronger mainstream around the 80s. Many blamed civil rights “taking too long” and Jim Crow type discrimination and political repression “lasting too long” on Reconstruction. Perhaps out of political convenience (easier to blame the past), but again, this wasn’t something new in response to Trump.
I think everything you described especially Floyd were part of the old pact on race. Disparate impacts were ignored and the right went with an idea that the failure of the black community was bad culture versus lower IQ and higher rates of criminality.
Before Trump George Floyd would have just been a drug addict overdosing. The revitalization of it was progressives.
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You might be right about me being off slightly. Key events I remember were all from 2015. Stuff like Apple censoring conflict simulators that contained the confederate flag. Dukes of Hazzard being memory holed also occurred in 2015. Amazon removing confederate flag merch also happened in 2015.
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I think it's pretty clear they would have, and that the Civil War was more about Federal control over the states than it was about slavery. I judge this based on how other countries prohibited slavery, specifically England. I don't think they would have continued slavery indefinitely any more than Brazil did.
Their intent was to withdraw from an agreement that they felt their supposed countrymen were not following. The basis of this refusal was of course slavery, but it could have been something else. I think you should read the declarations of secession. I did, and while slavery is right up and down all of the documents, it's revealing how many different complaints they had, and how reasonable those complaints are. These independents states agreed to combine to form a union for mutual prosperity, and the conditions of that union had been trampled for decades because one side was unwilling to abide by the agreement they had made.
What happened was Obama, and then Trump. And it's not about the Confederacy, it never really was and never really will be. It's about me, and white people like me, here and today. The one single person whose actions were most responsible for this statue being melted down is Donald Trump. When he won in 2016, half the country declared war on the basket of deplorables, and sought to tear down their statues and destroy their culture. Literal culture war. The statue was melted this week because Trump won in 2016. It was melted to show whites that this country doesn't want them, it doesn't want their history, it wants to rewrite the history of their nation to exclude them.
I didn't even vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but I can tell when people hate me and want me, my parents, my brothers, and my children dead and gone from this world. I can tell when they take symbolic actions, and I can interpret the symbolism. Now I wish I did.
Mississippi's makes it as clear as possible that all other issues were sideshows in comparison to the conflict over slavery.
Hard to get more explicit than that.
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Can you cite a few? There were some complaints about tariffs and such (the agricultural South had different financial interests than the industrial North), but for over fifty years leading up to the Civil War, almost all political conflict between the North and the South was very explicitly about slavery. Every presidential candidate (whatever his personal feelings) had to primarily calibrate his position on slavery in order to win enough votes from the South. Every new acquisition by the US became an (often violent) battle over whether it would allow slavery. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, these were bitter attempts to reconcile states over slavery. You sort of brush past the fact that "slavery is right up and down all of the documents" - yes, it was, because that was the issue. The "agreements that they felt their supposed countrymen were not following" were all about slavery.
All other disputes between the North and South - economic, cultural, whatever else you're thinking of - were comparatively minor and would never have led to a secession. The Civil War was about slavery.
All emphasis mine.
The very first paragraph from South Carolina.
Further reading, though I'm tempted to just copy the whole thing
It's not slavery, it's about reneging on the deal you previously made. None of the slave states would have joined the union in the first place without the concessions they received, concessions intended to prevent the North from controlling the South. Those concessions were systematically undermined and ignored for decades until finally it was obvious that the North never intended to perform on the duties it committed to, and never intended to respect the limits of the federal government.
South Carolina did not agree to be ruled by New York, South Carolina agreed to form a Union with New York under the condition that New York is obligated to return slaves to South Carolina. If New York doesn't want to do that, it's up to them to dissolve the Union, but instead they simply ignored the constitution and the agreement they had made with the free and independent states of the South in order to impose their rule.
I'm tired of people lying about it. The South was right to secede, and they have every justification to do so. They stuck a deal which was ignored and undermined for 80 years, until finally they had had enough and left.
And then Lincoln conquered them and forged the American Empire, and now we don't hear about the Free and Independent State of South Carolina, or These United States.
The Civil War was about federal conquest of the continent.
From Texas:
...
...
By other states - not the federal government. As recently as 1859 the year before Lincoln's election, the supreme court ruled in Ableman v Booth that state "personal liberty" laws didn't supercede the Fugitive Slave Act.
The irony is that framing the civil war as a matter of states rights isn't wrong...but it was over northern states asserting their rights to reject constitutional but morally unjust laws.
For an extra dose of irony, South Carolina nearly seceded during the 1830's...because they felt that states should have the right to nullify federal laws they found unconstitutional. And when the federal government capitulated, but reasserted that they could use military force to make states comply, South Carolina symbolically nullified that!
The secessionist states wanted a federal government that would force states to follow laws they found morally abhorrent - yet only for specific laws that would benefit the South.
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I don't buy it. The only reason the southern states feared federal control was because they feared it would be used to end slavery.
Could I ask what that something else could possibly be? It would have to be an extreme wedge issue that the seceding states considered an existential risk to their continued way of life.
In an alternate timeline where the southern states remained in the union but abolished slavery, the only thing I could think of would be the enfranchisement of former slaves.
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I am curious and confused why you have lumped “white people” in with Confederate history. Surely most white people in America were not Southern rebels, and there’s more to that culture than Robert E Lee? I realize that as a Southerner yourself it feels a bit more personal but… again, I really feel the Confederate issue doesn’t generalize. And part of it is just that Southern primary education more or less lies to its own people about this part of history. Not only do many texts outright lie about the causes of the Civil War, the South may have claimed that slavery would die out, but their actual actions reveal an active attempt at spreading it. A lot of these “reasonable complaints” just boil down to economic issues, made worse because the South didn’t want to take steps to rebalance their economy away from slavery. And they certainly didn’t want to treat Black people like the humans they are. That’s not something you can just glaze over.
They don’t just attack confederate symbols. Last time I checked Christopher Columbus was cancelled too. They pull his statues down which do have significant to my people.
I think his post was a little hyperbolic but it’s also sort of true.
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Ah, yes. This old canard.
Sorry, but I had to take 400-level history courses on Southern history before the notion that 'Well, the Civil War may have had other factors beyond slavery that caused it' even got brought up.
I'll believe my own eyes and experience, thanks.
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